The present invention relates to the health research industry, and more particularly to a method for providing a model in which the efficacy of antiretroviral drugs and vaccines can be determined in a relatively short time, as well as a retrovirus used therein.
An important step in the development of any vaccine is testing that vaccine for efficacy in the prevention of infection and/or disease. Testing for efficacy, as well as for safety and immunogenicity, is facilitated by the use of animal models, especially in cases where the potential success of a vaccine is questionable. Because of the world-wide spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the fact that HIV is associated with a disease with essentially 100% mortality, the need for a vaccine against HIV is self-evident. Almost from the time that HIV was identified as the etiologic agent of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), it has been apparent that the generation of a vaccine might be difficult for at least two reasons. First, no fully efficacious vaccine against a retrovirus, and none against a lentivirus, exists and second, all HIV isolates differ from one another in nucleotide sequence, which suggested they might also differ significantly at the antigenic level. These factors emphasize the potential importance of animal models that could be used to test putative vaccines for efficacy, especially those that reproduced the natural history of and disease progression resulting from HIV infection.
The major requirements for an animal model to be useful in vaccine efficacy studies are that (i) essentially all animals become infected following innoculation of virus; (ii) infection be easily detected by isolation of virus, which can be quantitated; (iii) seroconversion occurs; and (iv) infection elicits disease, preferably analogous to disease induced by the same virus in humans. The latter is important if the vaccine does not provide absolute protection against infection, in which case one could monitor and assess the effects of the putative vaccine on prevention or the severity of the ensuing disease.
A major obstacle to researchers has been the lack of a model which provides a means to quickly determine the efficacy of newly developed antiretroviral drugs and vaccines, and particularly those associated with AIDS. This is primarily because there exists no previously identified immunodeficiency virus capable of causing acute disease and death within a few days after infection.
Therefore, a need exists for a model in which the efficacy of antiretroviral drugs and particularly those associated with human immunodeficiency virus, can be determined in a very short time.
There also exists a need for such a model which provides a means for quickly evaluating antiretroviral vaccines
There exists a further need for a retrovirus capable of being utilized in producing such a model.